


Our love becomes a funeral pyre

by JaqofSpades



Series: Light My Fire [2]
Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Multi, TSC prompt 245, ghost!Nora
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 05:20:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5079409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/pseuds/JaqofSpades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Don’t kill your heart, Charlie.</i>
</p><p>It hurts, she pleads. It hurts, Nora, and you’re not here to take away the pain.</p><p>Charlie’s practical streak protests, but every other part of her leans into the brush of ghostly fingers across her cheek, the puff of sweet, hot breath in her ear, the touch that leaves her yearning and liquid.</p><p>The absolution in that last, loving whisper.</p><p>
  <i>Maybe it’s time to let them.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our love becomes a funeral pyre

**Author's Note:**

> This is my (late) fill for prompt 245 of The Second Coming, "this, Charlie, is marijuana," for Charlie/Miles/Bass. The ghost of Nora also features heavily, as it is a sequel the fill for this prompt, "Set the night on fire." I'm not sure whether it is best described as angsty porn or very porny angst. With an upbeat ending.

After Austin, they watch her constantly. Jason’s blood had stained her hands and stained her clothes; she worries that it has stained her soul too, rendering her transparent, naked. She feels damaged beyond repair, and is terrified that someone will actually notice. So she fights, and kills, and convinces herself that this is all she is now, each day winding her tighter.

The intervention, when it comes, is almost a relief.

It’s just the three of them, ostensibly running recon to see how much support they can muster for the move against Davis. Blanchard and Rhonda Carver have come and gone; the rep from California is due tomorrow. Stretching before them is a long, tense night, and the way Miles and Monroe keep glancing at each other is making her squirrelly.

“Feel free to take yourselves off to the nearest whorehouse anytime now,” she says flatly, and turns her back on them to go up to bed. It’s only the mirror on the wall that shows her how Bass kicks Miles, and gets a shove back for his trouble.

Then her uncle clears his throat. “Nah. Thought we’d stay in. In fact-- ” Miles reaches down into his duffle and pulls out two bottles of whiskey, proper pre-Blackout stuff with an actual label. “Blanchard said Texas was grateful.”

Her desperation to escape waning by the minute, Charlie lingers on the stairs. It’s Monroe who pulls a pipe out, and a small bag of finely crushed leaves. “Not as grateful as these boys were for my gentle reminder that Texas hadn’t updated its drug laws since before the Blackout. This, Charlie --”

“… is marijuana. I know,” she murmurs, suddenly fighting back tears. She wants to remember Nora purring in her ear, or flashing that wicked grin, or convulsing under her tongue. But the Tower, and the horrendous run of days before it, force their way in, and the face that rises before her is grey with pain, lined with guilt, ridden with sorrow. And Monroe is still grinning at her.

She has a knife strapped to her thigh. He would never see it coming. “For Nora,” she would hiss, and twist the knife until he begged her to tell him why.

“We were close, once,” Nora had confessed. “Miles and I were together, and Monroe …”

She hadn’t understood fully, not then. But the puzzle piece had fallen into place as the two Generals yelled battle plans in their private code, sloshed whiskey into each other’s glasses, fought every battle back to back. Six years apart, a war between them, and Miles and Monroe had taken mere days to fall back into perfect sync.

Charlie is pretty sure she knows what that slightly abashed shrug means now. The thought of it had filled more than one sweaty, sticky night, her imaginings of the three of them tangled together. Perhaps he had looked like this then, every muscle relaxed for once, face creased with mischief.

Had he grinned like that when Nora screamed under the hands of his torturer? Had he watched, and maybe caught his breath with fascination the way he had with Charlie? Or had he looked away, unable to bear the guilt?

The irony explodes in Charlie’s chest like a heart attack. Perfectly in sync, these two, even when they were tearing the country apart trying to kill each other. Everyone else was just collateral damage in their personal war. Even the people they loved.

“Charlie? Are you okay?”

“Kid?”

Monroe is closest, right behind her, but it’s Miles who tips her chin up to look her into face.

“Did you love her?”

His confusion flings her straight to fury.

“Nora, Miles. Did you love her” she demands through gritted teeth.

“I … I … What? Why?”

“I did, you know. Loved her. She was the best person I knew,” Charlie growls.

She turns her glare on Monroe then, hot and accusing. Unlike Miles, he knows exactly what she’s trying to say. She can see the horror twisting in his eyes. Say something, Charlie begs mutely. Make it all okay.

But he’s not capable, she hears Nora’s voice, gentle even in her head. _Giant sexy assholes, remember?_

I hate them. Both of them, even though …

_No. You don’t. You hate the things they did. And you hate yourself for wanting to forgive them. For wanting more than that._

Her entire body aches to reject the suggestion, but Charlie has never been good at lying to herself. Maybe that’s why she’s conjuring up Nora, some cynical part of her brain suggests. More likely she’s just missing her counsel, and knows what her mentor, her lover, her friend would say.

_Don’t kill your heart, Charlie._

It hurts, she pleads. It hurts, Nora, and you’re not here to take away the pain.

Charlie’s practical streak protests, but every other part of her leans into the brush of ghostly fingers across her cheek, the puff of sweet, hot breath in her ear, the touch that leaves her yearning and liquid.

The absolution in that last, loving whisper.

_Maybe it’s time to let them._

_*_

Charlie sips her whiskey slowly as she watches Miles and Monroe from the chair in corner. They had started at opposite ends of the ratty couch, but the space between them had disintegrated into a loose tangle of limbs as the room became wreathed in smoke. She wonders if they realise how frequently they touch each other, how their hands linger and stroke, how their shoulders and hips and knees bump together like so many kisses. The marijuana had ripped away the cloaks of hostility they shroud themselves in, and left only the things simmering underneath.

She drags in a long, unsteady breath as she looks away. So many things she would have been better off not knowing. The way delight washes over the room with Monroe’s mad laughter, and Miles loves it so much he forgets to hide his smile. The aroused growl her uncle gives when Monroe steals a lungful of smoke directly from his lips, and the way he retaliates, tangling his hand in the wild curls at the back of Monroe’s neck, locking them into place for a licking, biting kiss.

At first she wonders if they’ve forgotten she’s in the room, then she thinks they simply too high to care. The truth turns out to be very different.

Once they’re done devouring each other, they turn to her in perfect concert.

“So you should probably know that Bass and I like to fuck,” Miles says baldly, challenge written in every line of his body. He’s obviously expecting her to be shocked, or appalled, or outraged, and she wants to tell him she’s not her mother. That holds so many levels of potential disaster that she decides to hold her tongue.

“I know,” she says instead. “Nora told me.”

Miles blinks at her slowly, a reaction that still manages to shout his worry. Monroe snorts, then starts to hiccup before succumbing to what Charlie can only describe as giggles. Miles swats him without looking, and tries to summon his authoritative uncle voice.

“Nora talked about – us. Back then?

Charlie bites down on her lip at the memory and shifts in the chair, pulling her legs up underneath her. She doesn’t miss how Monroe cocks his head to stare, or how Miles has to look away.

_Oh, you’ve got them right where you want them, baby._

“Talked about a lot of things,” Charlie purrs. “When we didn’t have our mouths full.”

Miles snaps his head back in her direction, mouth agape. Charlie revels in the flash of triumph, and slips free the top button of her jeans. Then a second.

“She’d tell me about how you used to suck on her nipples, one either side, then work your way down her body. She liked that,” Charlie breathes, then undulates a little as her fingers drift over the sensitive skin of her lower belly.

Miles and Bass are positively transfixed, their eyes darting between the hand sliding back and forwards under the waistband of her panties, and her face as she tells the tale.

“But her favourite thing was watching you together.   She said sometimes you were just Bass and Miles, but other times … the hottest thing ever, she said. Watching the President and the General fuck each other senseless.”

But it’s a bad choice of words. Horrible memories stir – Nora’s grey face, the burns and bruises, the defeat in her eyes - and she burns with the need to know, to make them pay.

_Let it go, Charlie!_

“I wonder if you managed to torture that out of her, Monroe? Or maybe that’s how she lasted as long as she did – pretending it was just another one of your games. Who was it that liked to tie her up – you, or Miles?”

“Did you touch her, when she was your prisoner? Did you want to?”

Monroe’s face crumbles. In just one sentence, Charlie has flung him straight back to haunted, the drugs no longer able to insulate him from the reality of who they were. The things he’d done. The things we’ve all done, her sense of fair play hisses, but it’s too late. The lazy, sensual haze is gone.

For Miles too, she realises. He has pulled away from Monroe, body stiff with the onslaught of memory, hands obviously itching for his swords. “Answer the fucking question, dickhead.”

“No. I swear. I watched – I had to watch, I owed it to her. But I wouldn’t let them touch her. Not like that.”

“What was with the dress?”

Monroe swings to face Miles, pathetic in his desperation to be believed.

“I’d bought it for her – before. Her birthday was a couple months after yours, remember? But by the time it came round …”

Charlie knows only the barest details about those days, little more than anyone else who’d been living in the Republic at the time. General Matheson had been badly hurt in a bombing on his birthday, and President Monroe had gone mad in its wake. Nora had stuck around long enough to nurse Miles back to health, then left. Miles had tried to kill Monroe, but found he couldn’t.

Then he’d run away too.

“I don’t know what I was thinking, Miles. I wanted to see her in it. She was always so beautiful in white. Maybe I was trying to remind her of the good times. But then ––” his face hardens, and suddenly, General Monroe is in the room.

“I tried to be nice, Miles. I gave her plenty of opportunities to cooperate. It was the last thing I wanted, but we were at war.”

The cold glitter in his eyes offers the coda he hasn’t voiced. He doesn’t have to supply the details – they are Mathesons. They know.

They would have done the same thing.

“She died hating you,” Charlie whispers. “She can’t forgive you. Either of you, really. But she says I should. For my own sake.”

This is what pulls most at her scepticism. Because the voice is just in her head. Nora couldn’t possibly have known how things would fall out. And she sure as hell wasn’t ready to believe in ghosts. And yet …

_They were always going to end up together, and Miles would never let you go. Hardly rocket science, babe._

But this?

_Sometimes you need what you need._

*

Charlie pushes herself up from the chair, and reaches for the joint smouldering away unattended on the table. She takes a long hit, then she pulls her tank top over her head as the two men squawk in shock.

She throws it down on the ground in front of them, then nods towards the joint. “For the record? This has nothing to do with the drugs. I’m just sick of hating myself for wanting this.”

Miles is looking faintly panicked while Monroe can’t quite make it past gobsmacked. Charlie ignores them both to shimmy out of her jeans and then step out of her panties, adding them to the impromptu pile in front of the two men sitting on the couch. Then she unhooks her bra and throws it at them.

_Sexy Matheson asshole._

Charlie grins at Nora’s quip and feels them pretending not to watch her as she sways back to her chair. She waits until Miles is glaring at her before ostentatiously hooking one leg over the arm, and walking her fingers down the centreline of her body to hover over her mound.

“Nora loved my pussy.”

Miles makes a choked, pained noise as Charlie caresses the plump lips of her vulva with loving fingers, parts them to explore the sticky glory within.

“That day you spent with Foster? And didn’t come back that night? We spent it getting high, and then she ate me out. Over and over again. I came so hard, Miles.”

She has to swallow her laugh when his mouth works fruitlessly in an attempt to process the information. Poor Miles. So used to being worshipped by everyone in his orbit, so shocked by any other possibility.

Charlie takes pity on Miles and flicks her gaze to Monroe, only to find him staring at the wall above her head, body tense with what is clearly arousal, but still trapped by guilt. “Hey!”

His eyes swerve to her, shocked, and she tilts her hips in his direction to confront him with the sight of her fingers circling her clit, then plunging into the cavern below to tease her inner walls.

“She called you Bass, you know. I think it was easier, remembering you like that, after. But her friend Bass, well. Apparently he was always the one with the good ideas.”

His eyes flare to blue flame as she starts to fuck herself in earnest with two fingers. “Miles is hung like a horse and just likes to fuck, but you -- ,” she closes her eyes and slows her fingers, not willing to come just yet. “You like to make people come. Like to see them lose it, apparently.”

Monroe nods, face suddenly as predatory as a hawk. “Yeah. So don’t stop.”

Charlie wrinkles her nose at him and pulls her fingers out of her pussy purely to tease him. She glides them up her body, their paths visible as a glistening trails that end at her breasts, swollen and straining for attention. She flicks her fingernails over her nipples and barks in triumph as his cock leaps inside his pants.

“You should really do something about that.”

“I’d rather do something about you.”

“You haven’t earned me yet.”

“So how do I do that?”

Charlie turns her smirk from Monroe to her uncle, who is watching their interplay with mounting fury. She wants to roll her eyes but she forces her face blank instead, and issues the order like a whipcrack.

“Strip.”

Miles tenses like a racehorse set to flee. She’d gentle him, she thinks, if he was a horse. Maybe …

Charlie pushes herself up onto wobbly legs and crosses to the couch. There’s a space between them, but … she lowers herself to the floor, cross-legged at their feet, and props her head on his thigh.

“He’s got a lot to make up for, Miles. I want this.”

Her uncle’s voice is a mere croak.

“What? What do you want?.”

She looks back to Monroe, who is unashamedly palming the massive erection straining at the front of his jeans.

“I want to see you fuck him. Hard.”

Miles swallows, but then he’s stripping off his jeans, one furious look telling Monroe to do the same.

“How –“

“Jesus,” Charlie breathes as Miles’ cock springs free of his underwear. He’s huge, nearly as long as her forearm, and she knows nothing about it how it works between men, but …

“You ain’t bringing that thing near me without lube, Miles.”   The complaint rings somewhat hollow considering Charlie isn’t the only one licking her lips at the sight of Miles’ cock. Monroe is stroking himself slowly, and she can already see the first, damp smears of fluid gathering on the tip of his cock.

But she’s infinitely wetter.

Charlie lowers her back to the floor and crosses her ankles demurely, propping them up on the couch. They loom above her like gods, and the want rips through her, merciless and twisting.

“So make me come,” she invites.

A groan rips from Miles’ throat, but it’s Monroe moves first, his sword-callused hand swallowing her ankle.

“You sure?” he asks, and their eyes lock as she nods.

He slides to the floor beneath her, and pulls her legs up over his shoulders, telling her to brace them on the couch. She is so aroused, her tissues already flush with blood, that the first touch of his tongue makes her flood, and the second sets her bucking. Later, she’ll realise it is Miles who slides his fingers into her, triggering a second wave of convulsions. Miles who fucks her through them, long fingers hooked to massage a magical spot high on her inner walls, Miles who coos for her to give him just a little bit more.

Miles who coats his cock in her cum, and waits until she can focus before he starts to press into Monroe. “You still in charge down there?”

“Call it the ringside seat,” she jokes, almost regretting the fact she’s too well-fucked to move.   “And I say – on with the show.”

Monroe fills the smoky room with curses filthier than anything she’s ever heard as Miles penetrates him, gentler than she had imagined, but infinitely more filthy. His hands are clenched in fists and the tendons in his neck standing out and she’s wondering why, why do they _do_ this, when suddenly the sharp protests turn to husky cries of pleasure.

Miles glances down to make sure she’s watching and she gets to see every muscle in that long, pale body tensing before he shoves his hips forward, burying himself deep. Monroe’s cry is more a sob, but he’s slamming backwards now, meeting Miles with everything he’s got, and it’s the most furious, most intense, most beautiful fuck she’s ever seen.

_Hmm. Yes._

Miles reaches around to yank at Monroe’s cock, and she’s pretty sure they come almost simultaneously, Monroe spurting all over his own chest and while Miles bites down hard on his shoulder as a broken, hoarse noise escapes his chest.   They collapse down beside her, and it’s Monroe who gathers her to him, Miles wrapping around them both.

Charlie sleeps.

*

“What else did Nora tell you?”

She had woken to find fingers combing through her hair, Bass plaiting the strands as Miles cocked his eyebrow in question.

“You liked to play games. A bit of pain. Handcuffs,” Charlie murmurs, and rolls more fully towards Miles to give Bass full access to her hair.   She moulds herself to his side, and takes the stub of the joint from his hands for a long puff. “You like to fuck and he likes to suck,” she smirks.

“Oral fixation,” Miles agrees, “not that you’d hear Nora complaining.” He looks at Charlie, obviously weighing something. “Wanna know what her favourite thing was.”

“She told me.”

“Nah, kid, she didn’t. But we can show you.”

Monroe relinquishes his handiwork to ghost talented fingers up her sides and kiss her neck. “We’d really, really like to show you.”

Of course she agrees.

*

“Are you sure about this?”

“Just relax, Charlie.”

“I can’t, not both --- oh fuck. Miles!”

“Feel good?”

“Monroe …”

“We’re right here, baby. Got your back.”

Her laugh is high and frantic as they move in perfect synchrony. This. She’d never even dreamed of this, but how could it have ever been anything else? They’re taking her apart. Bit by bit. Exploding her into a million tiny pieces and putting her back together with every stroke of their cocks.

There’s nothing left but feeling. Pure sensation as they drive into her over and over again. The shelter of their arms, a warm, safe contrast to the punishing waves of bliss.

Nothing but them, together.

CharlieMilesBass, united. Whole. The way it needed to be.

A giggle fills her ears, and she’s not sure who it is, can’t find it in her to care, because she’s about to come again and ---

“Nora!”

_Told you so._

 

fin

 


End file.
